The historical speech of Frank-Walter Steinmeier
Federal President Steinmeier opens Documenta art exhibition
“Art can be offensive, it should trigger debates,” Steinmeier said at the opening of the documenta art exhibition in Kassel. Watch his landmark speech in full here.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier opened the controversial Documenta fifteen in Kassel today with a groundbreaking speech. The Federal President finally said what Claudia Roth had been waiting for in vain. Why Steinmeier almost canceled his appearance – and now everything has to be different.
SAlready the first sentence of Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s speech at the opening of the Documenta, Germany’s traditional art festival, is awesome: “I want to be open: in the past few weeks I wasn’t sure whether I would be here with you today.” The cancellation would have been tantamount to a clear announcement: since the first Documenta in 1955, the show has been opened by the German Federal President. This sentence indicated that this speech would probably become a historic moment: a clear criticism of those responsible for documenta fifteen. Because anyone who believed that Steinmeier would now go back to business as usual was wrong. He really got going: calm, clear and precise.
The most concise sentence is remembered: “Responsibility remains, yes! You can’t outsource it.” He addressed it directly to the “management and the shareholders of the documenta” and asked them to do justice to this “demanding task of mediation”. In the past few weeks, one would have wished for this clarity from Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth or from Kassler Mayor Christian Geselle.
What is so significant about this harmless-sounding objection? In 2019, Documenta commissioned Ruangrupa, a curatorial collective from Indonesia, to curate Documenta 2022. The group in turn commissioned other collectives, they commissioned others and others again – the snowball principle. In January 2022 it became known that some of the artists sympathized with the anti-Israel boycott movement “BDS” and others even openly supported it. The dissenting vote from Israel, however, would be completely absent in Kassel. You have to say it so bluntly: in the past few months, the documenta makers and the curator collectives have never faced up to the confrontation with the consequences of the BDS movement, either globally or in Germany. Instead, the criticism was dismissed as racism. But who is responsible for this development? The structure of the collective meant that a direct discussion became more and more difficult, people used the argument that they didn’t even know where the artists in Kassel came from.
But let’s follow Frank-Walter Steinmeier: “So why my hesitation in coming here today?”. And he continues: “Art should bring a society into conversation – a conversation, by the way, that we sorely need: a conversation striving for enlightenment that is less encouraged than suppressed in the outrage logic of social media and the daily urge of users to confess. ”
He also didn’t stop at one important question of this documenta: Is political activism art? Can collectives hide behind artistic freedom? He first put the positive answer in the mouth of Joseph Beuys, the symbol of activist art after 1945, only to then question it: “But that cannot mean that all those who use art for their political messages are outside of criticism stay. Especially not when they turn political activism into an art form.” There are limits! “To make that clear, I’m speaking here today,” he says. And then he clarifies: „Nobody who wants to be taken seriously as a debater in Germany can speak to Israel but remain silent about the six million murdered Jews.” Steinmeier also addresses the lack of Jewish artists from Israel and formulates his dismay at the effects of the BDS movement: “A boycott of Israel is tantamount to a refusal to exist”.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier will have to swallow once or twice when he walks through the documenta with his understanding of art: in the exhibition hall “WH22”, for example, he will encounter seemingly harmless floral still lifes by the artist Mohammaed Al Hawajri. The artist lives in Gaza and describes in a statement in the exhibition that his art is determined by the place where he lives: Everything is interpreted politically, even the most harmless motif. And so he started painting flowers.
He describes how hard it is to get paint in Gaza and how it has to be smuggled in by friends. In a series of photomontages he calls “Guernica Gaza”, he uses famous paintings from the European art canon, from Millet to Delacroix, for collages – to describe life in Gaza under constant threat. Is the comparison with Picasso’s Guernica, i.e. with the attacks of the Germans in the Spanish Civil War, already problematic for Steinmeier? Would he wish for an Israeli artist who, conversely, addressed the everyday threats in his country?
At the very least, the Federal President would have wished that all of this had been discussed before the opening of this documenta. Because Steinmeier believes in the chance of “a global memory”. It is only in the making, he formulates his concern and his request that from now on this process will be continued taking everyone into account: “It can only be convincing if it takes all memories into account. Also Jewish and Israeli memories.”
With this speech, the German Federal President heralded a real turning point – if it is actually heard. There will be a lot of work for some, especially those who were so happy after the opening of the documenta that so many people would come together with the same “mindset”.